She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks. But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was a _man!_ Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain. She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand. "He is gone," she said. "Very well," he nodded, shortly. "I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to--" "Impossible! nonsense!" "To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him," she concluded, unshaken. The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that boiled in his breast. "I tell you, miss, you can't break your engagement to Major King! That is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a soldier's word and a soldier's honor in this matter, miss. It is incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed." "I'm in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I'm old enough." "A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What's the occasion of this change in the wind? Surely not--" Colonel Landcraft's brows drew together over his thin nose, making small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face for justification of his pent arraignment. "Nonsense!" said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as if relief had come. "Put the notion out of your head, for you are going to marry Major King." "I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it is final." His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke. But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to the army and a glory to the nation. "You'll marry Major King, or die a maid!" he declared. "Very well, father," she returned, in ambiguous concession.